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The Beatles: The US Albums

Will Hodgkinson

January 17 2014, 12:01am, The Times

A Capitol offence: the Beatles albums were chopped up for the USGetty Images

The Beatles were and always will be the best group in the world. My mother-in-law claimed recently that the Beatles made no difference to her world or anyone else’s, but she was only saying that because she was cross about me not eating her Christmas pudding. It’s common to reject the Fab Four as overrated, but soak in the beauty of Blackbird, the sophistication of Tomorrow Never Knows and the energy of Day Tripper and you’ll be hard pressed to argue, as the contrarian journalist Peter Hitchens did in 2012, that the only thing distinguishing the Beatles from long-forgotten bands of the Sixties was their ability to produce “a worrying sort of hysteria in teenage girls”.